When creative people solve problems, they use more than just their brains. They "feel" the solution, sometimes literally becoming a part of the answer.
"Thinking and feeling are inseparable" said Michigan State University professor Robert Root-Bernstein who, with his wife Michele, have written "Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People," a book that creatively attempts to teach the creative process.
Written in easy-to-understand lay language, Sparks of Genius teaches the creative process by stealing the secrets of creativity from some of the best minds the world has ever known. Liberally crossing disciplines, some of these minds include physicist Albert Einstein, artist M.C. Escher, and poet e.e. cummings.
"We show that Nobel Prize winners, such as Einstein, rely just as much on visual imagination, bodily feelings, emotional senses, and empathizing as do writers such as Isabelle Allende and Stephen Spender or artists such as Pablo Picasso," Robert Root-Bernstein said. "The process of invention is always emotional and sensual and the resulting ideas are translated into words or numbers only in order to communicate with other people."
The authors argue that creative thinking occurs pre-verbally and pre-logically, without the use of words, numbers or equations.
"Ideas emerge in the form of feelings, emotions, movements, images and patterns," he said. "When we truly understand something, not only can we describe or explain it in words, numbers or art forms, but we can sense and feel it too. Thinking cannot be separated from sensation and emotion."
In researching the book, the Root-Bernsteins studied hundreds of biographies, autobiographies and interviews of people considered the top in their fields. The one common thread: all of them had to be able to describe how they did what they did.
"The 13 tools we describe are what creative people themselves say they use," Robert Root-Bernstein said.
The 13 tools include exercises in imaging, analogizing, recognizing patterns, discovering the essence of things through abstracting, and unleashing creativity through play. Many creative people empathize with their subjects, literally "becoming" the tree or animal they are painting; the electrons, stars, genes or viruses they are studying; the computers they are inventing; or the characters in the novels they are writing. From there, the process moves to transforming - the art of taking the images and feelings in one's head and communicating them to others in words, equations, sculptures, dance.
"Just reading about this isn't going to do it," Robert Root-Bernstein said. "You have to go out and try it and practice it and make it a part of your daily life. It's like learning to play a musical instrument. Sparks of Genius is full of exercises and games to make such practice fun."
The Root-Bernsteins also argue that today's system of education is sorely lacking when it comes to creativity. Because everything is taught in words or equations, students are given the tools to express themselves, but not to do creative problem inventing and solving.
"Our schools are not teaching kids how to solve problems," Robert Root-Bernstein said. "They're teaching them how to manipulate answers. We think they should be able to invent their own problems and methods of solving them."
One advantage of nurturing creative thinking is that it cuts across all disciplines. When one uses imaging and feeling to solve a problem in one particular discipline, those skills can be put to use in another as well.
"What you learn in one area can be useful in another," Robert Root-Bernstein said. "The skills one develops are transferable. This makes the arts particularly valuable contributors to a creative education."
The Root-Bernsteins point out that poet e. e. cummings, like many famous writers, was a painter and that Einstein, like many Nobel laureates, was a musician. Having a creative hobby is a better predictor of career success in any field than any other factor yet measured by psychologists, they said.
Robert Root-Bernstein, an MSU professor of physiology, is a former research associate of Jonas Salk, and a former MacArthur Prize Fellow. His other books include Rethinking AIDS and Discovering (which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Best Book award in 1990).
Michele Root-Bernstein is the author of Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris, which won the Sierra Best Book Award from the Western Association of Women Historians.
The couple previously collaborated on "Honey, Mud, Maggots and Other Medical Marvels," a book arguing that cutting-edge medical innovations often rely on knowledge of medicine's history, just as they argue that the best education should rely on knowledge of how the most creative people think.
Media contact: Robert Root-Bernstein
Physiology
(517) 355-6475, Ext. 1263
or
Tom Oswald
University Relations
(517) 355-2281
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